Have you tried subscribing to a ClubRunner Calendar?

Moderator

ClubRunner Team

The Subscribe to Calendar button is an Internet Calendar Subscription that you download and view in an email client. However, unlike a Calendar Snapshot, Internet Calendar Subscriptions are updated automatically. You can click on the Subscribe to Calendar button and copy the link to download and subscribe to the calendar, or someone can send you a link to the Internet Calendar Subscription in an e-mail message.

Currently if you visit the built-in Calendar page you should see the Subscribe to Calendar button found in the top right corner.

Have you subscribed to your club or district calendar yet? Let us know how it is working out for you.

Community Member

Beta Tester

Hi - Our club is also implementing a mobile app from GroupAhead for mobile club communications. We would like to automatically synchronize from our Clubrunner calendar into the mobile app. GroupAhead provides calendar integration by giving us a place to enter the link to a .ics file and periodically updating from there. We know some other Rotary clubs are using Google Calendar and doing this. Is the link for subscribing to the Clubrunner calendar giving us that link to a .ics file? I found in the Knowledgebase how to get .ics for an individual event, but did not find reference to the whole calendar.

Community Member

Beta Tester

Hi - Our club is also implementing a mobile app from GroupAhead for mobile club communications. We would like to automatically synchronize from our Clubrunner calendar into the mobile app. GroupAhead provides calendar integration by giving us a place to enter the link to a .ics file and periodically updating from there. We know some other Rotary clubs are using Google Calendar and doing this. Is the link for subscribing to the Clubrunner calendar giving us that link to a .ics file? I found in the Knowledgebase how to get .ics for an individual event, but did not find reference to the whole calendar.

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I went ahead and tried this. It appears to work except I get both a Speaker record that is time stamped at 12am and our weekly club meeting record (recurring calendar item) that is time stamped at the meeting time of 7:15am.

Community Member

Beta Tester

I spoke too soon on this. Besides the issue with the Speaker record timestamp, I started getting duplicates of the recurring weekly meeting record each hour when the app pulled it from the Clubrunner calendar subscription file. However, I did not get any duplicates of Speaker records or other one-time Events. Is a recurring event being coded differently in the .ics file? For now, I had to turn off the calendar subscription until I can clean up the duplicates that were pulled down via the subscription. Do I need to delete the recurring meeting and only have a Speaker record?

Community Member

Beta Tester

That is pretty odd @Ted Faigle , we haven't seen any reports of this happening in services like Google Calendar, or regular email clients like Apple Calendar or Outlook.

The ICS file is updated with new events, and the old events should not be changing. I would suggest contacting the developers of the third party product to investigate.

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Hi Zach- I asked GroupAhead to look at this. They replied with this info they said I could share with Clubrunner:

Each "Weekly Club Meeting" event has a "UID" that changes every time the ICS file is generated / downloaded

This is a serious issue, and is causing the duplicates you're seeing. Each event in an ICS file is identified by a "UID" identifier. But, every time our system downloads the ICS file from http://portal.clubrunner.ca/7740/calendar-feed, the UID on each "Weekly Club Meeting" changes, which makes it look like a brand new event. (The non-recurring events have consistent UIDs each time, though.)

This is against the iCal / ICS spec - UIDs are supposed to stay consistent. (Though it's possible Google Calendar might have implemented custom logic to detect and adapt to errors like this.)

Community Member

Beta Tester

Thank you for the additional details. I'll get this over to our developers to investigate.

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Hi Zach - Just checking in. Has anyone had a chance to look at this yet? For now, I am having to manually synchronize the calendar to the GroupAhead mobile app. Let me know if I should submit a support request besides the posting here. Thanks!

Moderator

ClubRunner Team

When the recurring items were originally developed, our testing showed that the event ID didn’t cause issues with our tested applications: Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, etc, provided it was unique per individual item. The recurring item itself is a single entry that is used to generate multiple event listings in the calendar and for the ICS file. We were not tracking each individual entry from the Calendar Item in the calendar, and thus unable to provide a specific unique identifier that did not change per event’s recurrence and download.

During investigation into the issue, we identified that several changes that were required would not be possible to fully implement before our code freeze on Friday last week. The current intention is to try to have the issue resolved for the next release on Aug 17th 2017, barring any major issues with QA or User Acceptance Testing.

I’ll do my best to keep you updated on any progress.

Also, thank you again for bringing this to our attention and giving us the specific details, we really do appreciate bug reports!

Community Member

Beta Tester

When the recurring items were originally developed, our testing showed that the event ID didn’t cause issues with our tested applications: Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, etc, provided it was unique per individual item. The recurring item itself is a single entry that is used to generate multiple event listings in the calendar and for the ICS file. We were not tracking each individual entry from the Calendar Item in the calendar, and thus unable to provide a specific unique identifier that did not change per event’s recurrence and download.

During investigation into the issue, we identified that several changes that were required would not be possible to fully implement before our code freeze on Friday last week. The current intention is to try to have the issue resolved for the next release on Aug 17th 2017, barring any major issues with QA or User Acceptance Testing.

I’ll do my best to keep you updated on any progress.

Also, thank you again for bringing this to our attention and giving us the specific details, we really do appreciate bug reports!